The Koreans are hardcore when it comes to schooling.

At the elementary school where I work we have a group of Koreans who come and take classes from about 3pm until 8pm. They're international students, sent away from their parents in Korea to learn English and experience our education system.

From 8am to 3pm they're in our school, then until 8pm they're in "Korean" school. They also go to school Saturdays.

These kids are young - 10 years old. Wow, that's hardcore. But apparently it's the norm in Korea. The children there apparently have 12 hour working days. After "regular" school, their parents send them to academies at night where they learn even more.

Apparently there's immense, cultural and parental pressure to succeed in school. If you don't get top marks, you don't get admittance to university or good jobs. Your station in life is directly correlated to your marks and your academic success.

I heard tests are mostly multiple-choice and there is very little teaching and promotion of creativity.

Nice to see our Korean overlords are building drones to one day rule over us and ensure we conform.

Schools don't teach this anymore.

One great thing about working in a school is that I get to talk to teachers about problems in the school system. Today I learned that schools in this province no longer teach printing or handwriting.

This means that there are many grade 5 kids who literally cannot write basic sentences or paragraphs. Because they never learned how to form letters, their brains are busy thinking about letters rather than thinking about what to write.

These are called "output problems". The cure for these problems is to teach children how to properly hold a pencil and form letters. Schools don't do it anymore.

Good to know. We'll add this to the list of things we need to teach Jake.

To draw better you need to learn how to see.

I was reading The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards. She said that drawing well doesn't have anything to do with hand coordination. It has everything to do with sight.

"When you see in the special way in which experienced artists see, then you can draw."

I thought that was such a great idea. It applies as a larger metaphor for life as well. The more clear we see things the more success we have.

Educating yourself is learning a new way to perceive or see the world. Painters and artists train themselves to use their eyes in a different way. Edges become beautiful. Negative spaces become beautiful. Shadows become beautiful. All this means that simple objects become fascinating.

Above are two drawings I did. A before and after. The before was my first drawing since grade school. The after, is about a week later after reading a third of the book.

How to be an amazing writer.

I'm reading Write like the masters : emulating the best of Hemingway, Faulkner, Salinger, and others by William Cane.

He says that starting in the 1930s or so teaching rhetoric was phased out of the education system. Teachers decided to suddenly promote "originality" when it comes to writing. "Find your own voice." "Be unique." "Never, never plagiarize."

The problem is that the great literary masters studied rhetoric, emulated their contemporaries and copied the style of legendary writers before them.

The current advice to find your own voice has made us worse writers. Cane argues that before you can be a "unique" writer, you need to copy the voice and style of the greats.

My own take is that writers today are just as good, if not better, than they were back in 1800s or earlier. But I see his point. A central tenant of neuro-linguistic programming is to find someone who's good at something, break down what they do exactly, and copy ("model") it.

If writers did this, perhaps they'd be even better. On the other hand it would require some tough, tough reading. The literary greats weren't known for writing short, exciting, concise, minimalist books.

We've gone overboard on literacy.

I was just talking to a teacher here at the elementary school and he showed me the grade 5 curriculum. Physical education was a half a page of goals and instructions. Social studies was a page long, same with science and math.

Reading and writing was 3 or 4 pages long. He said, "We've gone overboard on literacy." I asked him why and he said, "Because women have started writing the curriculum."

Then he got more serious and said, "Because kids don't read books anymore."

I said, "Is there a correlation between the length and detail of the curriculum and success at reading?"

He said, "Yes, an inverse one." He said a lot of the teachers don't bother with it - it's simply too detailed, unpractical and incomprehensible.

Then he gave me an example. "Imagine if the phys. ed curriculum was 4 pages long and kids were taught pre-kicking strategies before kicking a soccer ball, and kids were evaluated on 4 or 5 different aspects of kicking a ball."

I said, "Kids wouldn't want to do it. It would be annoying. They'd want to go read a book."

He nodded his head and I went to the washroom.